Editorial: Los Gatos still in a 'fine mess' at Albright Way

Anyone old enough to remember the famous comedy duo of Laurel and Hardy most likely can recall Oliver Hardy's oft-used catch phrase: "Well, here's another fine mess you've gotten us into."

Well, that certainly seems to be an appropriate description of where the town currently stands regarding the town council's approval of the controversial Albright Way development, the lawsuits that followed and the June ballot initiative created by those lawsuits.

The council approved the Albright Way development plan with a 4-1 vote back on June 3 of 2013, but nuisance lawsuits followed in an effort to force developers to make changes to a project that the town had already OK'd. What resulted was the Albright Specific Plan initiative that, after petitioners gathered nearly twice as many signatures necessary to qualify for the ballot, will go to voters this June 3--interestingly, exactly one year to the day following last year's council vote to approve the plan.

Now the council is considering the addition of yet another decision in this convoluted process: whether or not to place a competing ballot initiative on the summer ballot.

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Are you kidding? Does anyone else out there agree that this entire debacle is a "fine mess" already and that all parties should simply move forward and let the process play out?

Creating another initiative would just be a costly, time-consuming effort on the part of the town that would only serve to confuse voters even more than they already are. We agree with Councilwoman Diane McNutt, who said, "There is no way there's not going to be mass confusion about this initiative even if there's just one initiative," adding, "This is far too complicated to be trying to do this in this rush helter skelter way."

At the risk of throwing a little common sense into the mix, how does this sound? Leave things as they are, wait for the voters to to have their say and move on from there.Adding a second initiative to give voters a choice? Huh? We think they already have a choice: vote "yes" or vote "no."

Of course, Los Gatos could have avoided this mess had John Shepardson--of Los Gatos Citizens for Responsible Development--done initially what he suggested on Tuesday night: "We are prepared to drop the lawsuits if the developer agrees to abide by the town-approved plan."

Great. Now that it's already too late to pull the measure off of the ballot--at least, according to the initiative's attorney Sean Welch--Shepardson agrees to drop the suit that caused all of this in the first place. Los Gatos Citizens for Responsible Development should have dropped it all after the council approved the plan last June and moved on to concentrate their efforts on the next big fight--in the North 40.

We believe that now the council should move on, take a neutral position on the initiative and allow the voters who elected them to decide the outcome. We're confident that the town's residents will get us all out of this "fine mess."